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Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

Since the publication of Halliday (1988) a number of studies on the linguistic encoding of pain have appeared. These include Lascaratou (2003; 2007) on Greek, Hori (2006) on Japanese, Overlach (2008) on German. Using Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), this thesis adds another language to the existing body of work on how physical pain gets encoded crosslinguistically. The empirical work undertaken comprises the analysis of an original corpus of interviews with seven Italian speakers living with one of three chronic conditions: Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE), Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), and Spinal Disc Herniation (SDH). This thesis shows the multiple ways in which the lexicogrammar of Italian encodes bodily pain as THING, (nominally), HAPPENING (through verbs), and as QUALITY of something (adjectivally). The analysis shows that speakers in the corpus favour the first type of encoding and suggests why this might be the case. From pain itself, the scope of the analysis broadens to include the lived experience of physical pain related to chronic illness by looking at the informants’ use of evaluative language. This is analysed by means of Appraisal Theory (Martin and Rose, 2003; Martin, 2005; Martin and White, 2005), which identifies three attitudes encoded through the system of appraisal. These are: affect (the speaker’s feelings and emotive responses), appreciation (the evaluation of things and events), and judgement (evaluations of people’s behaviour). The analysis shows the most frequently encoded attitude is affect, with a tendency to favour indirect over direct encodings. It is suggested that this is because of a desire to avoid coming across as over emotional and therefore unreliable, a sentiment rooted in the informants’ experiences of having their symptoms and conditions doubted in the past, even in medical encounters. A broad narrative analysis approach is then used to explore the types of identities that are constructed and presented by the informants. The notion of agency is used to critique the commonly-held view of chronic illness and pain as completely disempowering. The analysis shows that – within the same individual – feelings of powerlessness coexist, in a fluid state, with notions of heightened agency. My informants work towards preserving a pre-illness identity where contradictions and paradoxes are harmonised through language.

<p> In this dissertation, I examine the predominantly oral practice of singing lyric poetry among members of the Neapolitan aristocracy in southern Italy during the late-fifteenth century. The tradition of singing Neapolitan lyric developed and gradually gained ascendancy in the Kingdom of Naples over the nearly sixty years of the Aragonese dynasty (1442&ndash;1501)&mdash;both in the capital city of Naples and at feudal courts throughout the Kingdom&rsquo;s rural provinces. The surviving song repertory and its preservation in late-fifteenth-century musical and literary sources bear witness not only to these varied performance contexts, but also to the inherently communal aspect of the tradition as a whole. </p><p> Combining approaches in musicology, ethnomusicology, and literary theory, I question the fixity and purpose of this written repertory in preserving a fluid and dynamic oral practice that flourished as the artistic expression of a subjugated class&mdash;Neapolitan nobles and intellectuals living under Aragonese rule. The manuscript collections, historical descriptions, theoretical and literary works that preserve and transmit the records of this oral practice demonstrate how writing was used to record, recollect, recreate, and ultimately memorialize a communal practice of song-making&mdash;lending value and legitimacy to the Kingdom&rsquo;s local aristocracy&mdash;during a tumultuous time in the history of southern Italy. Some copies, perhaps preserved on less durable media, have likely been lost while others preserve traces of orality with varying levels of fixity and transformation. How and why these records were created and preserved is the central question that this study seeks to answer.</p><p>

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Paris III, 1978. / Includes indexes. Bibliography: p. [2069]-2101.

Although Italo-Romance varieties continue to be documented, classified, and analyzed by dialectologists, many are at risk of not being recorded thoroughly and systematically before their imminent extinction. While considerable attention has been devoted to the phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, and lexicon of the more archetypal Romagnol dialects spoken in the Po Valley, dialectologists have largely overlooked peripheral Romagnol varieties such as Sammarinese. The present dissertation begins to fill this lacuna in Italian dialectology by providing an historical and synchronic study of Sammarinese phonology and morphology based on the examination of old and modern texts as well as copious oral data. The main purpose of the thesis is to delineate diatopic variation within the tiny Republic through comparative analysis, while also addressing the need for a more complete and precise definition of Sammarinese‘s position in the Romagnol linguistic group. In addition to confirming Sammarinese‘s status as a Borderline Romagnol variety, the dissertation offers evidence that Sammarinese is divided geographically into two main dialectal groups: Northeastern and Southwestern. The secondary intent of the thesis is to provide systematic, comprehensive, and phonetically precise documentation of the phonology and morphology of a moribund language. iii The dissertation consists of five chapters. The Introduction includes a brief linguistic history which relates diatopic variation to geopolitical factors. The first chapter also contributes an assessment of the status of scholarship dedicated to Sammarinese dialectology. Chapter 2 examines diachronic phonetics, emphasizing the dichotomy between the traits which link Southwestern Sammarinese to Borderline Romagnol and those which join Northeastern Sammarinese with the Romagnol varieties of the Po Valley. Chapter 3 treats synchronic phonetics and proposes a generative phonology which aims to identify the diasystem underlying phonetic variation within the Republic. Chapter 4 analyzes historical declensional morphology, underscoring diatopic variation in internal flexion configurations as further evidence of the division between Northeastern and Southwestern Sammarinese. Chapter 5 examines diachronic verb morphology. The dissertation concludes with an assessment of linguistic aspects meriting further research and analysis.

Although Italo-Romance varieties continue to be documented, classified, and analyzed by dialectologists, many are at risk of not being recorded thoroughly and systematically before their imminent extinction. While considerable attention has been devoted to the phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, and lexicon of the more archetypal Romagnol dialects spoken in the Po Valley, dialectologists have largely overlooked peripheral Romagnol varieties such as Sammarinese. The present dissertation begins to fill this lacuna in Italian dialectology by providing an historical and synchronic study of Sammarinese phonology and morphology based on the examination of old and modern texts as well as copious oral data. The main purpose of the thesis is to delineate diatopic variation within the tiny Republic through comparative analysis, while also addressing the need for a more complete and precise definition of Sammarinese‘s position in the Romagnol linguistic group. In addition to confirming Sammarinese‘s status as a Borderline Romagnol variety, the dissertation offers evidence that Sammarinese is divided geographically into two main dialectal groups: Northeastern and Southwestern. The secondary intent of the thesis is to provide systematic, comprehensive, and phonetically precise documentation of the phonology and morphology of a moribund language. iii The dissertation consists of five chapters. The Introduction includes a brief linguistic history which relates diatopic variation to geopolitical factors. The first chapter also contributes an assessment of the status of scholarship dedicated to Sammarinese dialectology. Chapter 2 examines diachronic phonetics, emphasizing the dichotomy between the traits which link Southwestern Sammarinese to Borderline Romagnol and those which join Northeastern Sammarinese with the Romagnol varieties of the Po Valley. Chapter 3 treats synchronic phonetics and proposes a generative phonology which aims to identify the diasystem underlying phonetic variation within the Republic. Chapter 4 analyzes historical declensional morphology, underscoring diatopic variation in internal flexion configurations as further evidence of the division between Northeastern and Southwestern Sammarinese. Chapter 5 examines diachronic verb morphology. The dissertation concludes with an assessment of linguistic aspects meriting further research and analysis.

Apart from discourse and yet somehow part of it, silence is a powerfully ambiguous linguistic phenomenon that blurs the lines between presence and absence. Eluding the material aspects of oral and written language, it is only perceptible as the gaps or spaces between words. Nonetheless, it plays a role in all linguistic productions: although silence itself cannot be directly communicated, it can influence communication. In a literary text, silence may takes on many different guises, including rhythmic hesitations, rhetorical omissions, and poetic oppositions that mimic the audible gaps of spoken language. The visual, aural, and fictional interaction of all these components ultimately induces otherwise unnamed meanings, meanings that exist as part of the symbolic network of a text, yet beyond the division and difference of signifiers. And while traces of this phenomenon may be found in literature from all historical periods and genres, the three medieval romances in which I have chosen to explore it - La Vie de Saint Alexis, Le Conte du Graal, and Le Roman de Silence - exhibit a particularly strong awareness of the communicative problems and possibilities engendered by silence. Each one demonstrates - albeit in a slightly different way - that silence is more than just omission: within their pages, it becomes an elusive yet create force that shapes thematic development and structures poetics. Ultimately, however, silence's structuralizing force is not just textual, but also ontological, affecting our existence and perceptions of who we are.

The aim of this dissertation is to question the concept of orality as the natural expression of ancestors in African novels and press for a reading of West African writers, which values their fictional creation as autonomous from their cultural origins. The main purpose of this study is to examine, through series of close textual readings, how francophone West African novels distance themselves from oral tradition by fully assuming literacy as a characteristic of the post-colonial Africa. The first chapter attempts a redefinition of orality, as only a critical discourse aimed at translating the complexity and the suspected hybridity of West African novels. Using examples of American southern folklore from Joel Chandler Harris, Alcée Fortier and Zora Neale Hurston, this study demonstrates how orality is built from hesitations between an intention of authenticity and its literary inventions as a response to oppressive and dominant cultural influences. In this regard, orality appears therefore like a comfortable concept, but an inaccurate reading for its failure to address the cultural and historical dynamism of the West African sub-continent. Therefore, through a reading of Cheikh Hamidou Kane's l'Aventure ambigue, the second chapter "witnesses" the making of authenticity as the simultaneous denial and the consciousness of universalism. Thereby, the recourse to oral tradition appears, as the third chapter emphasizes through examples from Bernard Dadié's Le Pagne noir and Léopold Sédar Senghor's La Belle Histoire de Leuk-le-Lièvre, as a pretext for African writers to make contemporary cultural proposals to their respective communities. In spite of the claim that it derives from speech, orality operates more like the negation of literacy and also as a contemporary review of West Africans' relation to their ancient cultures as the fourth chapter demonstrate with Djibril Tamsir Niane's Soundjata ou l'épopée Mandingue. Finally, the fifth chapter analyzes orality as a strategic writing practice by reading the conflict between speech and writing, in Ahmadou Kourouma's En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, as a proposal of a creative language which serves as vehicle for the adjustment of Africans in their encounter with western cultures.